I don’t know any other way to put it other than I feel almost traumatized from the plight of Fantine. I didn’t sleep after I read the description of her having sold her front teeth. Selling her hair, her teeth, her body- and after selling her teeth, we the reader are treated to nothing more than a sentence that says Cosette wasn’t ill at all… it was a ruse for the Thenardiers to extort money from Fantine.
I feel it was unintentional, but I found that Hugo’s next line after the description of how Fantine got her money, “After all it was a ruse of the Thenardiers to obtain money. Cosette was not ill.” was so… devoid of humanity, devoid of sympathy. Devoid of any empathy at all, that in the very moment I read it, Hugo himself was nothing more than a Thenardier to me.
I’m reading Les Mis for the first time at the moment and am at the point where Marius has encountered Eponine / the Thenardiers as his neighbours at the Gorbeau tenement. What is striking to me is the adject squalor they live in… The description of Eponine versus the image of Samantha Barker in the musical is quite a striking disconnect. Also, it hasn’t been outright stated but it seems to me that Gavroche is actually one of the Thenardier’s children? As someone who only knows the story through the musical, this detail is kinda blowing my mind a little bit. I don’t think it’s ever hinted at or referenced there? Then again, Azelma doesn’t exist in the musical either…
I’m absolutely loving the novel. It’s so vast and sprawling and dense. The biggest slog so far was all the stuff about Waterloo, which while interesting at points goes into such specifics as to be somewhat impenetrable. But most of the other tangents are actually super interesting and insightful.